The next big sci-fi thriller from Netflix looks like a cross between Black Mirror and a cyberpunk version of Irene Adler from Sherlock Holmes. The new trailer for Anon was released by Netflix on Thursday. Starring Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried in an ultra-realistic near future, the movie looks fantastic. The subject of the film is mind hacking, which in this trailer comes across both sexy and scary AF.
At one point in the trailer, an unnamed character says “this level of anonymizing makes all crime possible.” What he’s referring to is the fact that in this future, crime seems to be tracked by some kind of cranial implant that records what everyone does. This feels a little like “the grain” in the Black Mirror episode “The Entire History of You,” which is also connected to the tech in the more recent episode “Arkangel.” In those sci-fi contexts, everything you did could be recorded. Anon takes that to the next level and wonders what would happen if you could edit those mind-recordings?
Amanda Seyfried in 'Anon'
Seyfried plays a character with no name who specializes in stealing people’s secrets or erasing them. This makes her seem like a cyberpunk version of the famous Sherlock Holmes blackmailer, Irene Adler. When that character was rebooted for the 21st century in BBC’s Sherlock, the new Adler had a souped-up smart phone full of all sorts of encryption that enabled her to send compromising photographs of powerful people in a second.
Anon feels like it’s taking that premise — a master blackmailer and keeper of secrets — and moving it into the realm of neural lace sci-fi speculation. While the technology for actually brain-hacking isn’t entirely clear cut, some believe it could happen way sooner than you think.
Anon hits Netflix in just a few weeks on May 4. Hopefully it will be just as great as it looks.
